“Why I Write” by George Orwell (post 2): He is “driven on” and must "efface one's own personality” due to alternate personalities he “can neither resist nor understand”

He converses with, or gets out of the way of (“efface one’s own personality”), alternate personalities (“imaginary persons,” “demon”) who take over and which he “can neither resist nor understand”:

“From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer…

“I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons…

“…for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise…the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind…This habit continued till I was about twenty-five…Although I had to search, and did search, for the right words, I seemed to be making this descriptive effort almost against my will, under a kind of compulsion from outside…

“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand…And…one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality…”

Pseudonym

Why did Eric Arthur Blair continue to use a pseudonym (George Orwell) after everyone knew who he was?

Judging from what he says about why he writes, the pseudonym would seem to have been an acknowledgement that his regular personality, Eric Blair, was not the personality mainly responsible for his serious writing.

Search “pseudonyms” for past posts on other writers.

1. George Orwell. “Why I Write” (1947), pp. 243-248 in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four [1949]: Text, Sources, Criticism, second edition, edited by Irving Howe. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963/1982.